Tangled in the Wires of the Mind:

Brazil (1985) and Democracy

By Selen Kaptan

Directed by Terry Gilliam, Brazil (1985) depicts a dystopic future where dreams are the only way to escape a reality that is filled with corruption of perception. Somewhere in the 20^th century, in a country where the bureaucracy has all the power to control everyone, people are distracted from the real world by a cumbersome amount of paperwork. Although the system of this authority seems like it can ensure order on the surface, it is established upon nothing but an entangled mess of wires, ducts, and piles of papers. It is such a mess that a dead bug’s remains cause a typo on the typing machine among the mess of paper piles which leads to a man being mislabeled as a terrorist and killed. In this system of disorder, while even a literal bug can cause one to be identified as a terrorist, the government includes even more piles of paper by charging people for the expenses for the torture they perform on them. With more paperwork and more wires, the chances of getting labeled as a terrorist and getting whisked away to a torture chamber increase even more. This brings this question to the mind: are there really terrorists in this country?

With random explosions happening around the country along with random people disappearing in this totalitarian government, the protagonist of the movie Sam Lowry escapes to his world of dreams where he flies across the lands and saves a damsel in distress. When this damsel turns out to be the neighbor of the man who was killed because of a typo in a paper, Sam’s life starts to transform. This damsel named Jill starts searching for her neighbor; however, as the number of documents the government asks from her gets more and more and she gets tired of running from one department to another, she refuses to comply with the paperwork. Just because of that, she gets labeled a terrorist right there at the government building without any kind of a judicial process. Similarly, the man who was accused of being a terrorist in the first place, instead of Jill’s neighbor, turns out to be suffering from the same fate as Jill as he refused to deal with the paperwork the government required him to do. Then, being a terrorist is nothing but a state that serves the scapegoating process of the government. It is a state of being that exists hypothetically just for the bureaucracy to present itself as the order and peace maintainer. Thus, the government maintains the order by doing nothing but manipulating peoples’ perceptions through a non-transparent decision-making process.

With a high ratio of corruption in its institutions that can unjustly label anyone a terrorist, it is also almost impossible to escape torture in this country. With also Sam being one of those who got tortured and even went insane at the end, the movie highlights the importance of freedom and the necessity of not being treated in a demeaning way. The only way it seems to prevent facing a humiliating treatment is through the right to a fair trial that is away from secrecy thus, democracy.